An RM56,000 Question

What does it take to make an RM21K mistake? ~Wait... Latest news, with special colours and all, RM8 per piece of the mistake... (additional info added at 8.30pm)

1 Blurcase.

Ah, now I fear for my salary. I don't know whether I should have such a sentiment or not, but I am not the least bothered by the loss of RM21K on my company's part. I am more bothered by the potential loss of RM2.1K on my part...

Well, it started off like this. My colleague, Blurcase, made a trivial error on the size of a piece of artwork. I don't know how, but she managed to get the sizes wrong and thus, when the printing of the real product came into play, we made a loss of RM3 per print, times 7,000 pieces. (RM3 x 7,000 = RM21,000 Simple maths)

So, now, tell me... how many companies out there have RM21K lying around to absorb this loss??

Well, in hindsight, she is not entirely in the wrong, but she does play an integral part in this. Well, she's been making loads and loads of mistakes with her artwork. Sometimes, she prints out the exact same thing for me a good 5 times in an hour just to ask me to check. And everytime I check, there'd be errors. Some of them new errors because she moved things around, and some of them are just plain left out. I had to tell her to change 'Favorites' to 'Favourites' for like 5 times in the same day, and in the FINAL check, it still came out Favorites!!!

I think the bosses also have a hand in this in a sense because they didn't keep an eye on her. Well, if you hire a cheap employee, you'd have to expect that the fella knows next to nothing and keep a good eye on the fella. So, that's the reason why I am not the least sympathetic with my bosses. It was their decision to hire this Blurcase in place of other more experienced (and expensive) employees. But then, you could argue that it's such a simple task, and normally, no one could get this thing wrong. But of course, shit happens... It always does.

It is that bad.

So, she was given this seemingly simple task of reproducing an old piece of artwork, with very VERY minor changes. And she nailed it... I mean screwed it!

I won't go into details yet until the deal is confirmed. (To protect myself and my bosses, just in case some good client of ours reads this...)

But do remind me to tell you the outcome of this later.

So now, I am braced for my bosses to tell us that we don't have enough money to absorb this cost... and the inevitable will indeed happen.

Now, for my RM21K question: Should I be sympathetic or should I just leave at the first glimpse of an opening?? Should I offer to be 'sacrificed' and go look for a new job somwhere else? Or do I at least attempt to stay on-board until the very last minute?? What's the normal etiquette on this?

Seriously, I have never had myself in such a situation before.

Oh, it's the end of the month, and our paycheck's aren't out yet... Bad signs indeed...